From Aristophanes to Hitchcock, Celebrating Birds and Culture

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The Greek director Nikos Karathanos's adaptation of Aristophanes's "The Birds" is at the heart of a citywide festival exploring how birds have influenced artists for thousands of years.CreditCreditStavros Habakis

If you took a — forgive the phrase — bird’s-eye view of culture, it wouldn’t take long to see just how much ornithological inspiration has led to some of the greatest art of the past few thousand years. Their flight and liberty, but also their imprisonment, have been metaphorical fodder for titans like Aristophanes, Picasso and Stravinsky. Maya Angelou’s bird sings of freedom.

So Violaine Huisman faced no small task in organizing “Birds: A Festival Inspired by Aristophanes,” the Onassis Cultural Center’s citywide festival featuring theater, visual art, music, museum and spoken word events that began on Sunday and runs through July 8.

“It’s both a very strict idea, and at the same time an incredibly broad one,” Ms. Huisman said. “When you start looking across culture and history, birds are literally everywhere.”

At the heart of the festival is Aristophanes, whose ancient comedy “The Birds” will be staged at St. Ann’s Warehouse in a raucous adaptation by the director Nikos Karathanos that is coming to the United States after a sold-out run in Greece.

Mr. Karathanos said that the play, which is about two Athenians who build a utopia in the clouds with the help of birds, is a constant revelation for him. He pointed to the relatability of the characters, who think the world is too small for them and aim for a better life above the world, and to the false paradise they end up making, which has a border wall to keep out unwanted migrants in search of the same freedom.

“This says so many things that correspond to contemporary realities,” he said.

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Taka Kigawa playing Messiaen's "Catalogue d'Oiseaux" at the American Museum of Natural History.CreditRoderick Mickens, American Museum of Natural History

But don’t expect the whole festival to be purely an homage to classics and a reflection of current events; it’s also, simply, fun.

“One of the goals of this was to be really intellectually rigorous and playful and in that sense inclusive,” Ms. Huisman said. “You don’t need to know anything about Aristophanes and ancient Greece to engage in the festival. You can, en passant, find out about these things.”

Events that have already taken place have juxtaposed, for example, the heady music of Messiaen with the family-friendly environment of the American Museum of Natural History, where the pianist Taka Kigawa played the composer’s birdsong-filled “Catalogue d’Oiseaux”. Other festival highlights are as cerebral as a talk with the novelist Rachel Kushner and the filmmaker Paul Schrader, or as sweet as a meet-and-greet for children and baby birds. The full lineup is at onassisusa.org.

Here are five of the festival’s wide-ranging offerings.

Aristophanes’s ‘The Birds’

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"The Birds" at St. Ann's Warehouse.CreditStavros Habakis

At first glance, Mr. Karathanos’s adaptation (written with Giannis Asteris) may look like a revival of the musical “Hair,” with visually rich nods to pop culture, ancient Greece and drag queens. Much of Mr. Karathanos’s inspiration, he said, comes from the text of the play itself, which he said is like Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen all in one. But he is also open to whatever else the audience sees in the comedy. “When the curtain goes down,” he said, “I hope you have been opened up as a human being and your mind has been expanded.”

Pigeon Toes: Bird Walks

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A walk led by Paul Sweet from the American Museum of Natural History.CreditRoderick Mickens, American Museum of Natural History

Paul Sweet, an ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History — which touts having the largest bird collection in the world — will lead bird-watching tours at Brooklyn Bridge Park. “It’s playful and inclusive,” Ms. Huisman said. “It’s also genuinely looking at the phenomena of birds in our culture and highlighting how present birds are around us.” Don’t forget your binoculars. Comfortable shoes wouldn’t hurt, either.

‘The Birds’ and ‘The King and the Mockingbird’

Could any bird festival be complete without Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 thriller? “What I found really interesting in this film is that it presents the opposite view of everything else: birds as ominous creatures,” Ms. Huisman said. “They can be free and inspiring, but they can also bring visions of doom and fear. There’s nothing more versatile than birds.” For something gentler, check out “The King and the Mockingbird,” an animated French film from 1980 that Ms. Huisman loved as a child — and that Hayao Miyazaki counts among his influences.

Louise Lawler’s ‘Birdcalls’

Ms. Lawler’s 1972-81 audio installation — a humorous fixture of the west garden at Dia:Beacon — features the names of famous male artists shouted in the style of birdcalls. Visitors to St. Ann’s can hear it as part of the exhibition “Nature of Justice: On the Birds,” just outside the theater. “It’s a way of talking about birds in a very literal way, but also in a very metaphorical tongue-in-cheek way,” Ms. Huisman said. “She spoke the names of the artists as if they were birdsong and poked fun at how they had glorified themselves, but it also makes fun of birds themselves while admiring their boldness.”

Meet the Fledglings

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Meet the Fledglings, an event for children and baby birds.CreditNew-York Historical Society

This one falls under the category of purely fun and adorable. As part of the New-York Historical Society exhibition “Feathers: Fashion and the Fight for Wildlife,” children can come to the museum to learn about baby birds and feed them. “I can’t really imagine anything cuter,” Ms. Huisman said.